Auditory Adaptation in Voice Perception

Abstract

Perceptual aftereffects following adaptation to simple stimulus attributes (e.g., motion, color) have been studied for hundreds of years. A striking recent discovery was that adaptation also elicits contrastive aftereffects in visual perception of complex stimuli and faces [1-6]. Here, we show for the first time that adaptation to nonlinguistic information in voices elicits systematic auditory aftereffects. Prior adaptation to male voices causes a voice to be perceived as more female (and vice versa), and these auditory aftereffects were measurable even minutes after adaptation. By contrast, crossmodal adaptation effects were absent, both when male or female first names and when silently articulating male or female faces were used as adaptors. When sinusoidal tones (with frequencies matched to male and female voice fundamental frequencies) were used as adaptors, no aftereffects on voice perception were observed. This excludes explanations for the voice aftereffect in terms of both pitch adaptation and postperceptual adaptation to gender concepts and suggests that contrastive voice-coding mechanisms may routinely influence voice perception. The role of adaptation in calibrating properties of high-level voice representations indicates that adaptation is not confined to vision but is a ubiquitous mechanism in the perception of nonlinguistic social information from both faces and voices.

Tracking Vocal Pitch through Noise: Neural Correlates in Nonprimary Auditory Cortex

“…The f 0 of each voice was defined as the frequency that exhibited the maximum of the long-term power spectrum of the recording (Hess, 1983). The extracted f 0 values clearly differed for the female voices (224 and 231 Hz) and the male voices (100 and 148 Hz), and they were compatible with values from the literature (Hwa Chen, 2007;Schweinberger et al, 2008). Similar f 0 values were obtained when using an approach based on the autocorrelation function (Hess, 1983).…”

Gender bending: auditory cues affect visual judgements of gender in biological motion displays

“…With that in mind, there are important diVerences between the methods used here and those used by others. For example, the eVects reported here were elicited by adaptation periods almost three times longer than those used by others (Kovacs et al 2006;Schweinberger et al 2008). Similarly, the stimuli used here were abstract representations of gender categories (female walkers, male walkers, and so on), rather than speciWc examples from within categories.…”

“…Those issues are important because, while gender aftereVects have been reported by others, there are data to suggest that the eVects are category speciWc (e.g. Kovacs et al 2006) and do not generalise across modalities (Schweinberger et al 2008). It is tempting to interpret those results as suggesting that gender is encoded only within modalities (visual, auditory, and so on) and even within categories within a modality.…”

A uniform phase representation for the harmonic model in speech synthesis applications

“…Indeed, applications involving spoken outputs, such as speech coding [7], require the speech signals to be represented by a set of features yielding almost transparent analysis/resynthesis. Voice transformation and speech synthesis impose even stricter requirements, since the parametric speech representations they deal with must provide a solid and flexible framework to sculpt all the characteristics of the speech sounds through direct manipulation of the features (see, for instance, [8][9][10]). Interestingly, recent statistical trends are also encouraging research on parametric speech representations with a constant number of parameters and with good mathematical properties [4].…”